Three Questions with Jeff Gordon

The voices have gone from a whisper to an annoying rumble. "What's wrong with Jeff Gordon?" they say.

Jerry Bonkowski

The voices have gone from a whisper to an annoying rumble.

"What's wrong with Jeff Gordon?" they say.

After dominating much of the first 26 races last season, Gordon admittedly is struggling this season. In nine starts, he has yet to win and has just three top-five finishes.

Even worse, Gordon has been in a significant slump, finishing 43rd, 13th and 19th since finishing runner-up to Denny Hamlin at Martinsville four races ago, and has slipped to 14th in the Sprint Cup points standings.

But with a stretch of races that he historically does well at – including Saturday's event at Richmond, where he has two wins, 12 top-five and 18 top-10 showings in 30 starts – Gordon is feeling pretty optimistic.

Q. You have struggled in the last three races. What are your thoughts about Richmond and these next few races coming up?

A. I'm very excited about all the tracks from here to Charlotte (Richmond and Darlington). At Richmond, we improved on last year and were top-five both races. I think that is our biggest challenge. With this new car and us not quite figuring out the 1.5-miles, we were on a streak of tracks that are not our best tracks. Now we are coming to our best tracks. All that really matters to me is that, I am not saying we have to go out there and win, but need to put solid finishes together at them. We need to capitalize at the tracks that are good tracks for us. We have some good tracks that we can definitely put some good finishes together.

Q. You've never been a guy who likes to test a lot, yet you have a pretty busy testing schedule in the next few weeks. Why is that?

A. We just came back from a test in Nashville. We test again this week, and then we have the Charlotte test coming up. So I feel confident those tests are going to help us in areas that we need to work on.

Q. Are you concerned that you've dropped to 14th in the standings, especially with the way you dominated the points all the way up to the Chase last season?

A. If I had to go through and think that every week, I couldn’t last very long in this series or in this sport. You can’t do it like that. You just have to go out there and work hard and get the best finish you can. It doesn’t matter whether you win or whether you finish 43rd, you go on to the next one and all you can do is your best. We know we’re a competitive team, and we want to be competitive.

Jerry Bonkowski is National NASCAR Columnist for Yahoo! Sports and a featured contributor for Gatehouse News Service. He can be reached at NASCARColumnist@Yahoo.com.